There are hundreds of microphones on the market. Maybe thousandseach one designed for a specific purpose. And while they are generally built to last, microphones don't live forever. Which begs the question: When it's time to update your mic system, which mics are right for your church?
As with almost everything related to audio, it depends on what you are trying to achieve. There are, however, some commonalities; rare is the church that doesn't want its pastor's vocal mic to offer speech intelligibility. Beyond this, there are a number of options: Should the pastor employ a handheld unit or a lavalier mic that affixes to his or her lapel? Or, what about a headworn mic?
HEADWORN VS. LAVALIER
For Donnie Haulk, president and CEO of AE Global Media Inc., an AV design and integration firm based in Charlotte, N.C., it all comes down to preaching (or teaching) style. "A headworn mic works well for expository ministryteaching and expounding," he explains. "When a person refers to the word preaching,' that indicates more emphatic delivery and a higher decibel level of presentation. You want to be able to have a microphone that can receive the SPL of the program material." He notes that when a pastor starts preaching hard, some headworn mics will begin to distort. "In fact, handheld microphones are the best for that type of delivery, because the pastor can change the proximity of the microphone to their mouth." A teaching pastor, on the other hand, may excel with a headworn mic, which allows for the hands to remain free.
One issue with headworn mics is that even though they are close to the source (in this case, the mouth), requiring less gain and therefore decreasing the potential for feedback, some pastors find them uncomfortable, acknowledges Andrew Kornstein, who heads up the HOW department at Sennheiser Electronic Corp. based in Old Lyme, Conn. In these cases, pastors may opt for a lavalier, which limits volume.
"With a lavalier, there is a greater chance of feedback," Kornstein explains. "It's not going to be as loud, and you won't be able to push it as hard as an actual headworn mic." The trade-off is clear: if you want to be loud, then you may have to consider a headworn microphone.
As an increasing number of churches augment their use of video (be it through image magnificationIMAG, recording or broadcast), size matters: the larger the mic, the less aesthetic it is on screen. "Smaller [sized] mic elements have facilitated a lower degree of visibility or a higher degree of stealth," notes Chris Lyons, manager of technical and educational communications at Shure Inc., a microphone manufacturer based in Niles, Ill. "The idea of wearing a microphone that is half as big as your thumb suddenly seems gigantic because there is a transition to more television-appropriate standards in terms of the allowable appearance."
Haulk notes, however, that the smaller the microphone, the more challenging it is for the monitoring system. "Headsets are a little more forgivingyou can usually get a little more volume out of your monitor with a headset than you can a lapel, and then a handheld is the best as far as feedback rejection for monitors," he explains. This means that microphones are only one element of the platform design: preaching style and the coverage pattern of the monitor system must be taken into account when selecting the right mic.
MORE THAN MICS TO CONSIDER
Lyons points out that microphones also interact with the sound system in the room itself. While there may exist five mics that are perfect for mic'ing a particular voice or instrument, the scope of their directional patternhow broad, or tight, their pick-up rangemay not react well to the room's acoustics or the placement of the loudspeakers in relation to where the mics are. "The microphone has to match both the source and the sound system in a room," he says.
As with vocal mics, there are a number of variables that go into the selection of instrument mics. For starters, which instruments you are actually mic'ing? If, for example, your rhythm section includes guitar, bass, keyboards and drums, you may get away with direct boxes or one microphone on the guitar amplifier, but up to eight microphones on drums. Grand pianos can also be mic-intensive, but drums tend to require more microphones than any other instrument on the platform, and they must be durable. After all, a drummer's job is to hit his instrument, and sometimes mics take some abuse as a result.
Lyons suggests that while instrument mic'ing techniques run into the dozens, in a church setting, the simpler the approachthe better. "In a typically reverberant worship space, many instruments can be heard just fine with little or no amplification," he says. The focus, then, should be on those instruments that the congregation can't hear that well from a distance, such as an acoustic guitar.
Regardless of the microphones you select, it's important to remember that changing out mic systems will not solve much larger problems that exist in a poorly designed sound system. "If your system sounds lousy, or has very poor gain before feedback because somebody installed the speakers in the wrong place, buying a new microphone is not going to make any difference," Lyons says. " It's like trying to fix a broken leg with a band-aid."